ATTENTION BOOMERS. Remember the good old days? How we locked arms and ended the war? Well, the time has come to dust off the placards and rally once more in America’s plazas to stop another vicious war based on lies and deceit–one being waged against us personally. You may not have noticed, but it started a few years ago when Tom Brokaw issued his own Gulf of Tonkin resolution, publishing a book that dubbed our parents “The Greatest Generation.” For some reason, the idea took root and, through repetition, became accepted as a self-evident truth. It’s nonsense, of course, since as we’ve taught the world, no one is entitled to call something the “greatest,” thus implying that something else is less great.
But knowing that the old folks don’t have much longer, we humor them with this fiction, nodding our heads and smiling the way one does when the fat kid finally crosses the finish line. The greatest? Hah! The luckiest, maybe–lucky to be born during Prohibition, lucky to grow up in the Depression, and lucky to fight on Omaha Beach and Iwo Jima.
I mean, come on; they got the chance to face down both poverty and evil in the space of 15 years. Oh, that we had had the same opportunities, we’d have finished the job in ten. As Bill Clinton, the most famous–and most quintessentially Boomerish–Boomer of them all, said wistfully of the September 11 attacks: “I wish this had happened on my watch.”
Like our children, who are fortunate enough to have Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden as adversaries, our parents were the beneficiaries of history. They came of age at a time when the world needed them to take out the garbage and sweep off the porch. That they did so with a measure of success doesn’t imply an inherent greatness in their collective character any more than a parking ticket makes the meter maid a hero. Never forget that, Boomers. Never let them make you feel inadequate for putting Che on your dorm wall instead of Betty Grable in your duffel bag. It’s not your fault.
In fact, the next time you’re forced to watch some old guy raise his pants leg on national television to show off his USS Indianapolis scar, consider what sorts of unworthy enemies we Boomers had to measure ourselves against in our youth: the suburbs (a stultifying prison of Eisenhowerian homogeneity intended to subvert our uniqueness and unfairly curb our sense of entitlement) and Vietnam (a supposed bulwark against Eisenhower’s dominoes that was as phony as McCarthy’s list of Communists).
You should take pride in knowing that we did better than any other generation could have done with such thin material, first by protesting against and then by abandoning both the suburbs and Vietnam as not being in our best interests. Yes, making the personal political required a kind of genius that, historians agree, no other generation had ever exhibited. It took unprecedented audacity and courage to trash the dean’s office, shut down the university, set fire to the ROTC building–and then hand the dean a list of demands that began with “no reprisals.”
But we didn’t stop there.
Indeed, it took Boomers to point out the truth which not even veterans of Guadalcanal and the Bulge had the insight to coin–that war is not healthy for children and other living beings.
It took us to question authority (though given who our authority figures were, this should be considered a no-brainer rather than a profound accomplishment).
It took us to grant power to the people–the addition of “the” thus elevating a 100-year-old concept to sublimity by referring only and specifically to the crowds present at antiwar rallies.
It took us to realize that nothing on television is unimportant and that anything not on television can’t possibly be important–both of which we realized by watching ourselves grow up on television.
It took us to abolish honorifics like “Mister,” which made it okay for our kids’ friends to say “Wassup, Bob?” and for all of us to feel good about it.
It took us to institute pass-fail in college (in order to do away with competition) and then transform kindergarten coloring books into elite preschool admission tests.
It took us to free our black brothers and sisters from four centuries of injustice and terror, which we did not by marching in Selma or becoming Freedom Riders (not our fault! we were too young!), but through far more subversive and effective means–by buying a hundred million Motown records.
And yes, it took us to bring the word “f***” into common, unashamed, mixed-company usage (as in “We don’t want your f***ing war!”, “What the f***’re you doing in my seat?”, and “I’m warning you, don’t f*** with me, Mom!”).
This, Boomers agree, was our proudest achievement of all, because it overturned 5,000 years of recorded tyranny. We clearly recall the early ’60s, being assaulted by cries of “golly” and “swell” and “keen” in the malt shop. We can’t forget how radio programmers across America refused to play Jimmy Dean’s “Big Bad John” until he re-recorded its final words to say “a big, big man” instead of “one hell of a man.” And we shake our heads at the sad memory of Art Garfunkel recounting for a Simon & Garfunkel audience how he and his partner had unwittingly posed for photos against a subway wall on which someone had scribbled, ahem, “the old familiar suggestion.”
To a Boomer, such compulsory euphemisms brought to mind the horrors of medieval France. And so, just as a few brave and inspired souls before them had fought to hasten the Enlightenment, so too did Boomers sacrifice themselves and their high-school detention records for the greater good of shouting “f*** you” over the air, on Broadway stages, in movie theaters, and from across the street (where it’s now, also thanks to us, nearly acceptable to perform the physical act to which the word refers). Keeping it real–that was the goal. And with mission accomplished, Boomers can all feel satisfied, particularly when they hear 9-year-olds keeping it real at dinner.
So stand up for your generation, Boomers. We worked hard for our place in history, having to ride our bikes on streets and sidewalks unprotected by crash helmets, and open aspirin bottles without childproof lids. Think back to our salad days–how we marched shoulder to shoulder, fists raised defiantly, our voices chanting in unison, each of us determined to reach our destiny and remake the world in our image. Well, thanks in part to the dean who agreed that there really would be no reprisals, we finally got there. We are the world! We are the children!
Joel Engel, Berkeley, class of ’73, writes what he knows.
